We’re barely even a whole week removed from the day President Donald Trump declared during a Cabinet meeting that he doesn’t want anyone from Somalia in the U.S. because “they contribute nothing,” and not even a whole week removed from officials in Minnesota announcing that the Twin Cities were preparing for a federal immigration crackdown, targeting its large Somali community — and already, that Somali community is sounding the alarm over said targeting.
Minneapolis Councilman Jamal Osman, who is of Somali descent, recently told ABC News that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had already begun targeting locations for English as a second language courses, places of worship, and the homes of Somali migrants. This indeed tracks, considering ICE and Border Patrol have, since the start of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, been looking for any and everyone who even looks like they might be an “illegal” by swarming Home Depot parking lots, labor pools, and other workplaces associated with brown people. They’re also literally arresting migrants at their immigration hearings. All the while, the administration has, ad nauseam, claimed it was going after the “worst of the worst” violent criminals and expecting us to ignore its own data that shows the overwhelming majority of ICE detainees have no criminal record at all.
“This is not the America that I imagine,” Osman said of Trump’s bid to boot Somalis off of American soil indiscriminately. “What we’re seeing is not just politics; it’s dangerous.”
From ABC:
The councilman said those with social security numbers and work permits, and those waiting for asylum interviews have been targeted, as well as U.S. citizens. Osman said that people are afraid to leave their houses, and he is advising those of Somali descent to carry passports everywhere they go.
“[I] never knew there will be a day that you have to show your legal document in the United States [because you look Somali],” Osman said to ABC News on Wednesday. “But the reality is people are not leaving home without their passport.”
ICE said on Thursday that agents had arrested 12 people in its Minnesota enforcement operation, the Associated Press reported. Of those, six are Mexican nationals, five are from Somalia and one is from El Salvador, according to the news gathering service.
Amiin Harun, an immigration attorney in Minneapolis, who is also of Somali descent, told ABC News in an interview on Wednesday that the vast majority of Somalis living in Minnesota are citizens, permanent residents, or documented asylum seekers.
Meanwhile, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin is still sticking to the DHS’s outright lie that agents are not engaging in racial profiling.
“What makes someone a target of ICE is not their race or ethnicity, but the fact that they are in the country illegally,” McLaughlin said. “We do not discuss future or potential operations.”
Nah — it’s absolutely about race and ethnicity.
Here’s what I wrote about this previously:
Listen — all hate speech is dangerous, but it’s especially dangerous coming from President Donald Trump, because we know it’s only a matter of time before his hateful and oppressive speech becomes hateful and oppressive policy.
For example, over the past week or so, Trump has been talking about the nation of Somalia like it personally tracked mud into the ballroom he destroyed the East Wing of the White House to create. He has repeatedly described the country as some post-apocalyptic hellscape where people “don’t have anything” except crime, has described the people of Somalia as “garbage” and “trash,” bloviated about how he doesn’t “want them in our country,” and he’s even repeatedly attacked U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) just because she has publicly criticized him while being born in Somalia, a country she hasn’t lived in since she was eight. What’s worse, Trump flies into these anti-Somalia rants completely unprompted.
For example, on Monday, we reported that Trump randomly launched into an angry rant about Somalia and Omar after being asked questions about the recent shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., who, by the way, wouldn’t have been in D.C. in the first place if Trump hadn’t deployed them there via an order that was deemed unlawful by a federal court. Trump was even asked by a reporter what Somalia had to do with the shooting, which a man from Afghanistan stands accused of, to which the president responded, “Ah, nothing, but Somalians have caused a lot of trouble, they’re ripping us off a lot of money.”
In fact, McLaughlin was recently asked by a reporter to clarify just how many of the Somali migrants in Minnesota were “garbage,” as Trump called them. It would’ve been the perfect opportunity to say then that “what makes someone a target of ICE is not their race or ethnicity.” Instead, she said this to CNN’s John Berman on Wednesday:
“John, we’re really looking at the data, the analyses here, particularly out of Minneapolis, and other parts of the country where we’re seeing Somalia, there’s widespread fraud, particularly marriage fraud when it comes to immigration. We’re looking at criminality here.”
So, basically, McLaughlin is out here being vague and nonspecific about supposed “data” while parroting exactly what Trump has previously said, citing no statistical evidence whatsoever. But Berman pressed her further.
“My question is, all of them? The president says he doesn’t want them here. He called them ‘garbage.’ Do you consider that to be all of the 40,000 people born in Somalia now living in Minnesota?” he asked, to which McLaughlin responded, “John, this is not about politics, this is about public safety.”
So, there you have it: Berman asked about Trump’s anti-Somali bigotry, and McLaughlin, in typical Caucasian conservative fashion, dismissed the issue of bigotry as an issue of “politics.”
For the record, according to the Associated Press, about 84,000 of the 260,000 Somalis in the U.S. live in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area — meaning that the 40,000 figure Berman referenced was actually off by more than double, and almost 58% were born in the U.S. Of those who are foreign-born, 87% are naturalized citizens.
Make no mistake, though, Trump was calling all of the approximately 260,000 Somalis in America “garbage.” The idea that race and ethnicity have nothing to do with the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda is demonstrably nonsense, and the administration proves it every single day.
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